Arbitrary Reactions
by TheMortician'sDaughter
Summary: A collection of drabbles following the conjoined lives of Tony Stark and Bruce Banner. Rating subject to change, and requests are always accepted and appreciated.
1. Nightlight

**Prompt:** _**In which the light of Tony's arc reactor helps Bruce fall asleep at night.**_

* * *

Ever since the incident, falling asleep had been a chore.

He was almost afraid of closing his eyes, letting his mind drift away in a direction he couldn't steer. Few things brought him comfort at night, and he usually found himself running on an hour or two of rest and caffeinated tea.

That worked for him. No, it wasn't exactly the most ideal plan, but as long as he could rise early and do what he needed to get done, sleep was unnecessary. Sleep was for the weak.

However, since he'd been invited to make a home at Stark Tower and graciously accepted, he found that sleep came more easily to him.

Perhaps it was the comfort of knowing the home was at least semi-permanent, or perhaps that he knew he was safer here. There was something oddly comforting about the whole thing, even after the battle that'd left both the building and the city around it in ruins. Something he couldn't quite put his finger on.

Maybe it was that he wasn't alone.

It was a given, or at least one he'd convinced himself of, that he needed solitude. To be alone was his only option, or so he thought – maybe being alone made it worse.

Because he found that late at night, after the timer on the television had switched off and the room had gone dark, the soft blue glow of another man's artificial heart somehow gave his mind rest.

"I feel like such a child," he'd once commented, his voice slurred with exhaustion. "It's like I'm afraid of the dark." Despite his fatigue, he managed a small smile that Tony probably couldn't see, but he was sure that the other was wearing his signature smirk.

"Hey, everyone's got to be afraid of something." Bruce felt the loose arm around his shoulders tighten a bit. "But you're not afraid now."

"No." Bruce inhaled the cool night air that drifted through the window, sinking into the cushions of the sofa. "Somehow this is all very… comforting."

"It's me, isn't it?" Tony asked, chuckling softly. "It's me. Ever-comforting Tony Stark."

"More like this." He tapped the blue sphere on Tony's chest.

"Oh, I see how it is." Along with the soft glow of the arc reactor, Tony's laugh was refreshing as well. "Using my lifeline as a nightlight."

"May as well add that to your title too, while you're at it."

"So," Tony paused for a second, "Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist, and nightlight?"

Smiling, Bruce leaned into Tony's shoulder. "Yeah. Just don't go around offering your services to anyone else."

"I don't think anybody else deserves it, anyway."

And with that, for the first time in he didn't know how long, Bruce fell asleep, knowing that he wouldn't be alone in the morning.


	2. Hair

**Prompt: **_**Something about Bruce/Tony and one of their hairstyles and how the other reacts to the idea of changing it.**_

* * *

Sauntering into one of Tony's workshops, Bruce found the billionaire seated behind a desk and staring at the rather obscenely sized computer screen before him, mumbled to himself some jargon about whatever he was researching.

"Research?" Bruce inquired, stopping behind Tony's chair and resting his arms on the back of it. He kept his eyes averted from the screen, knowing that his boyfriend had the right to his privacy, and Bruce too had the pet peeve of other's reading his doings over his shoulder. "Although for some reason I feel like I'm wrong," he added, a hint of a smile pulling at his lips.

"Uh, yeah. Research, you know." Tony shrugged and quickly closed the internet window, swiveling in his chair to face the man behind him. "Nothing overly important." Bruce recognized that tone of voice, the tone that Tony often used when he was eager to hide something, and though Tony thought he was good at it, Bruce and almost everyone else on the team or involved could tell quite easily.

"You sure?" Bruce asked, stepping back to lean against the desk instead. "You seemed awful eager to hide that search engine there."

"Really, Banner, it's nothing. Harmless Googling. You know, we all get bored."

Bruce paused again, glancing to the screen and back. "Why do I feel like you're hiding something from me? This isn't really like you."

"I'm not hiding anything."

Sighing, Bruce looked towards the ceiling, rather unnecessarily, and said, "JARVIS? What's he hiding?" Tony exasperatedly clicked his tongue. As much as he liked JARVIS and the fact that he'd designed the AI himself, sometimes the system and its tendency to respond to Bruce as well could be rather annoying.

"Hairstyles, sir," the disembodied, accented voice replied. "Mr. Stark has been intending to change his appearance."

"Damn, JARVIS," Tony muttered, running his fingers through his hair. "Can't you just ignore him sometimes?" He glanced at Bruce, who strangely enough, was smiling again.

"Hairstyles?" he asked, seeming to chuckle at the word. "You were hiding an image search of hairstyles? Really, Tony?"

Tony shrugged. It was true, honestly – he tended to get bored with his hair very easily, and as vain as that made him, a grown man fussing over his hair, a little change was nice every once in a while. "Yeah," he finally admitted, bashfully rubbing the back of his neck.

"And you were hiding this from me, why exactly?"

"I didn't think you'd want me to change my hair." Tony shrugged again, more indifferently this time. "I mean, you seem to be pretty fond of it." He shot the typical Stark smirk in Bruce's direction.

"Please." Bruce rolled his eyes and walked forward again so the two were eye-level, and he purposefully thread his fingers through Tony's thick, dark locks. "I don't care what you do with your hair, Tony."

"Really?" All of the apprehension from before had trickled from Tony's voice in his response. "Sometimes you can be awfully… grabby."

Bruce would never admit it, but yeah, Tony was right. It was like Tony's lifelong goal to get Bruce to say he had a hair-kink or something of the sort, but Bruce thought it was fairly obvious that the kinks he _did_ have didn't and actually couldn't involve any type of hair.

Brushing off the comment, Bruce glanced at the computer again, even though the window was closed. "What were you thinking of doing, anyway?"

"Not really sure, honestly." Tony rolled his chair back to the computer and brought up the search again. "Maybe I would buzz it, you know, for convenience. Maybe something shorter to slick it back more easily. Or if I wanted to get _really_ creative, I could always go for the classic Mohawk or something." He grinned stupidly. "Anything. Just something to switch up my style."

"Of course," Bruce murmured, his chin resting on Tony's shoulder as his lips ghosted over Tony's jawline. "Cause we know you're just _all_ about style."


	3. Movie Night

**Prompt: **_**In which Tony and Clint make Steve watch **__**Inglorious Basterds**__** and convince him that's how World War II **__**really**__** ended.**_

**(This one isn't completely Bruce/Tony, but still has an element of it and is a drabble nonetheless, so enjoy. :) )**

* * *

"So what exactly is this movie about again?" Steve sank into the leather couch in front of one of Tony's obnoxiously large televisions, watching the opening credits begin to scroll on the HD screen.

"It's a recap of what happened in the end of World War II, since, you know, you were spending time in your personal freezer at that point," Tony replied, shooting a sly smirk at Clint, who was sprawled out over another recliner. "JARVIS, dim the lights."

Steve sighed. He had a feeling in the back of his mind that he couldn't completely trust Tony's judgment on this one, because to him, _Inglorious Basterds_ seemed like a rather odd name for a documentary-like film on one of the world's most intimidating conflicts. But then Clint had come into the picture, backing up Tony's reasoning, and somehow the three had ended up in the entertainment room that afternoon, equipped with popcorn, soda, and thanks to Tony's personal preference, a bottle of tequila.

The movie began, and throughout its course, Steve found himself wincing at a few select moments, questioningly raising his eyebrows, and every once in a while, Tony would pause the film to answer one of Steve's many questions about how in the hell any of this seemed historically accurate with some sort of snarky remark about how it would all work out in the end.

"But Dr. Banner told me Hitler committed suicide," Steve countered towards the ending, after Clint had explained the complete reasoning behind the dictator being repeatedly shot in the face by Brad Pitt (who now, according to Tony, was an important historical figure), and Tony pressed the 'stop' button when the end credits started rolling.

"_No,_ no, don't listen to Bruce. Brad Pitt was behind it all," Tony said through a mouthful of popcorn. "Guy's a badass."

"The name doesn't sound very familiar."

"Ah, well, he wasn't a very well-known guy." Tony shrugged. "That's what made everything easier for him. He wasn't a big name in the military, you know? Rarely mentioned in textbooks or anything." At that, he reached over his shoulder towards a magazine on the end table, some sort of celebrity tabloid one with the headline '_BRANGELINA Engaged!' _in large yellow text across the front, and shoved it underneath into a drawer. Pepper really needed to stop leaving her things around his tower.

Meanwhile, with much difficulty, Clint had been successful at suppressing his snickers through the film. "I think that one woman is still alive, too. The one who owned the movie theater they killed Hitler in. The theater's ruins are a huge landmark, you know."

"Really?" Steve asked, suddenly awash in fascination. "Maybe we should go there sometime."

"Yeah." Tony was wearing that famous shit-eating grin on his face. "We should."

"We should go where?" Tony looked over his shoulder to find Bruce in the doorway, holding a thick manila folder in hand. The doctor took one glance at the movie screen, then at the DVD case on the coffee table, and sighed to himself. "What did you do now, Tony?"

Rolling his eyes, Tony stood up and put the DVD back in its case, tossing it back onto the couch. "Why do you always assume that _I_ did something? We were just showing Steve a movie. You know, catching him up on a few things."

"_Inglorious Basterds, _though? Really?"

"Hey, we all seemed to like it," Clint threw in, looking over at the blonde soldier on the couch. "Right, Steve?"

"I thought it was a pretty cool way of depicting history." Steve shrugged.

"Uh, yeah." Bruce scratched the back of his head and shoved the folder into Tony's hands before he could protest with his usual 'I don't like being handed things' line. "Brad Pitt is, um… he's not too shabby, I guess." He then gave Tony one of those disapproving-boyfriend looks, shaking his head.

"You think he's hot, don't you?" Tony smirked.

"What? No." Bruce rolled his eyes again. "Just… stop corrupting the Captain, alright?"

"So not happening," Tony replied as Bruce turned around to leave. When the door fell shut behind him, Tony turned around and set the folder and its contents on the table, picking up another DVD case on his way.

"Corrupting?" Steve asked suddenly, a hint of panic in his voice. "What did he mean by _corrupting?_"

"Oh, nothing." Tony popped the new disc into the DVD player. "You know Bruce. Just looking out for ya."

"…why?"

"No reason." He stole a glance at Steve's disbelieving expression, then looked back towards the screen again.

"What are we watching now?" Clint inquired.

Tony grinned stupidly and picked up the case, laughing to himself over the last time he'd seen the film. Seeing Bruce's reaction to the actors onscreen was priceless enough that Tony had to find a way to show it to the others. "_Sherlock Holmes."_


	4. Crotch Monster

**Prompt: **_**In which Tony walks in to take a shower and finds a naked and rather satisfactorily-sized Bruce stepping out.**_

* * *

As usual, Tony hadn't noticed that the time had neared midnight. He had those tendencies to work and endlessly work in his shop for an obscene amount of hours, and it usually wasn't until someone came down to get him that he finally stopped.

But tonight he realized that, hey, maybe it would be a decent idea to take a shower. There were smudges of something on his face and his arms were coated in grease, and he didn't even want to think about what his usually-glorious hair looked like.

After he locked up his workplace he headed upstairs to the master bathroom, not taking notice of the fact that the shower was still on. It was rather late, anyway, and after how long he'd been working, it wouldn't be uncommon for him to start hearing things. Tony stripped himself of his grease-stained shirt and began unbuckling his pants when the shower made a rather loud squeal, and he jumped.

"The hell was that?" he muttered, walking towards the closed door. He thought he heard a muffled profanity through the wood and some movement following it, so he decided to open the door.

At first he didn't notice the problem, but then his eyes found the stark naked Bruce Banner standing towel-less before the shower, eyes wide.

"I, uh - Tony, what are you...?" the doctor stammered, his eyes scouring the room for the towel he'd obviously forgotten.

Normally Tony would have just tossed him a towel or pants or something and it would have been the end of it, but this time his eyes were otherwise occupied. "Dude."

"What?" Bruce asked quickly, and the man was obviously getting more flustered by the second. "Um, if you wouldn't mind, I'm kind of... not..."

"Dude," Tony said again, half of a surprised smirk on his face. "Your dick is like the size of my arm."

At that, Bruce's face turned a ghastly shade of bright pink. "I...thanks?" _Is this even a thing you say thank you for? _he thought, caught completely off guard.

"Like _wow_," Tony continued, this time with a chuckle. "Why the hell are you hiding a crotch monster like that? You need to let that destroyer come and out and play, Big Guy."

_Crotch monster? _Bruce wasn't sure whether to laugh, cry, or bury himself in a dark hole for the next century, so instead he just tried to accept Tony's eccentric vocabulary. "I don't really...think much of it, I guess. I mean, it's just...my genitals."

"Well, you should. Jesus Christ, what's a boner like with that thing?"

"I'm just not going to answer any more questions about my penis, thank you." Awkwardly, Bruce slid past Tony and grabbed his towel from a rack, making quick work of wrapping it around his waist. "And I'm not telling you about the Other Guy's, either."

"Oho." Tony laughed to himself, adjusting the shower curtain. "I think that'd be a sight for sore eyes, my friend."

Bruce didn't quite know what to say, and as if the whole event of Tony walking in on him naked wasn't awkward enough, it had to be made worse by the billionaire fawning over Bruce's rather... _decently sized_ organ of copulation.

"Let's not tell the others about this little run-in, alright?" he finally said, hoping it would serve as a conclusion to the whole thing.

"But why? It's super intimidating to other guys if one has a monster dick," Tony countered, stepping into the shower.

"As if I'm not already intimidating enough," Bruce muttered to himself, before adding a little bit louder, "It's just not something I like to flaunt."

"Well, you can feel free to flaunt it to me whenever you like." The shit-eating grin on Tony's face was even audible in his voice.

"I, um, thanks for the offer?"

"Hey. Bros flaunt overwhelming penis size to other bros. It's practically in the instruction manual."

Finally, thankfully, Bruce was fully clothed, but the red still hadn't left his cheeks. He scratched his damp hair and decided to just try and forget this whole event, despite knowing that Tony would never let him live it down. After all, endless reminders of embarrassment were another mandatory stipulation in the 'Bro Manual.' "...I'll have to look that one up."


	5. Screen

**Prompt: **_**The screen separating the two of them seemed like it would have been an obstacle, but Tony clearly doesn't think so.**_

* * *

"So Fury wants us to do what, exactly?" Tony stepped around the table, twirling a pen around his fingers. The battle with Loki had ended a mere twenty-four hours ago, and Fury already had Tony and Bruce back in the lab investigating something that Tony obviously didn't listen to.

"He wants us to investigate the Chitauri," Bruce replied dryly. His eyes were fixated on the transparent screen before him, digitalized charts and graphs dancing around his brain, for a reason that he honestly didn't care to think about, either.

"Why? We nuked the source. There's nothing _left_ for us to investigate." Tony sighed in exasperation. "Sometimes I think he just gives us this crap to get us out of his hair… or lack thereof."

That made Bruce smile a little bit, and he had to admit it felt good to do so. After the entire thing, even though they had won, things were still tense and he felt as if they were all still walking on eggshells.

"If anything, I'd rather investigate how the hell I survived that fall," Tony continued, sauntering over to the other side of the screen. "I mean, the suit's designed for pretty much anything, but I don't think it could really withstand falling out of a hole in the sky."

Bruce hesitated for a second, his hand hovering over a diagram on the transparent screen. Nobody had told Tony that the Other Guy had been the one to catch him as he plummeted, and though the others tried to convince him otherwise, Bruce wanted to keep it that way. "Maybe it was built a little stronger than you thought it was," he replied, shrugging one of his shoulders.

"I don't think so." The skepticism in Tony's voice made Bruce almost afraid to look at the other man's eyes through the screen, so he kept his gaze averted. "There would have been a helluva lot more repairs if I'd just fallen and landed on the ground."

"I, I don't –" Bruce shrugged again, shaking his head. "I don't know. The Other Guy was probably off smashing something. I don't really remember what happens afterwards. Maybe someone else knows."

"They do." Tony reached towards the screen and swiped away whatever Bruce was looking at, the both of them awash with a sense of déj_à-vu. _"Hey. You don't have to hide behind the Big Guy. You've gotta still be in there somewhere."

Bruce cracked a humorless smile. "It's not a big deal, Tony."

"It kind of is, actually. I'd be dead if it weren't for you, you know."

"Not me." Bruce paused to slide his tongue over his bottom lip, his typical nervous quirk. "The Other Guy."

"Well, whatever – you, the Hulk, whichever one you want to say, saved me from falling out of space and breaking every bone in my body. That's a debt I don't think I can completely repay you for."

"You don't have to. He did it out of… courtesy, I suppose."

Now it was Tony's turn to hesitate for a moment, looking through his own reflection in the transparent screen to the man on the other side. It always seemed like this was how it always turned out – him on the other side of what he wanted or what he needed, some sort of wall separating him from the thing he longed for.

"You don't think that you're good, do you?" Tony asked softly, his face almost dangerously close to the screen.

Bruce exhaled through his nose and looked away to the corner where Tony had swiped the graphs and diagrams to. "I try my best."

"Yeah, well." Tony stifled a sigh. "If you weren't a good guy than it wouldn't have manifested in the Hulk like that. Give yourself a bit more credit, Banner." Bruce had no response to this and he looked down for a moment before reaching back towards the screen to resume what he was working on earlier. Before he could do so, though, Tony latched onto his wrist and pulled him forward, feeling his lips meet the cool glass of the screen directly opposite of where Bruce's did the same.

It was a strange sort of feeling, kissing a screen – it lacked the sort of intimate connection two people shared in a normal embrace, but somehow knowing that it was Bruce on the other side of the half-inch thick glass made the whole thing less strange and more significant.

It didn't last very long, for obvious reasons, and when Tony finally stepped back and looked through the screen again, he found that Bruce's face had turned a light shade of pink in the process.

"Looks good on you," Tony commented nonchalantly, referring to the doctor's obvious blush. "Maybe I should do that more often, then." He grinned stupidly.

"I, um." Bruce was clearly flustered, and Tony found this really, well… adorable. "Yeah?"

"No problem, doc." With that, Tony swiped his hand across the screen and the work from before reappeared. "I take it you've accepted my thanks, then."

Looking past the diagrams and formulas, a hint of a smile ghosted across Bruce's lips. "Yeah. Any time."


	6. Lil Gamma Hammer

**This is based on a post someone (i-cant-believe-its-not-canon) made on tumblr about wanting a fic about Bruce being able to rap really well, but nobody knowing about it. I thought it was an amusing idea, so I threw this together for them. People seemed to like it, so I figure I'll put it here too.**

* * *

Bruce would never admit it.

There's a lot of things he wouldn't admit, really, like how sometimes he still pines for the dirty, bustling streets of India, or how he still has trouble falling into a peaceful sleep even when he knows he's safe as could be in Stark Tower, or when he sneaks into Tony's lab late at night to examine the schematics of the arc reactor lest anything ever happen to the eccentric genius with nobody around to fix him.

Yeah, there were a lot of things. But maybe he could find a way to lift the lid on those someday, maybe if the timing was right.

But, Christ, he would never, _never _let anybody find out about his rapping.

He wasn't _embarrassed, _per se, or at least he liked to think he wasn't. He'd done it as a teenager, when things at home got too rough and he found himself sneaking into a friend's house at some ungodly hour of the morning when he was fairly sure his father was asleep. They'd practice in that friend's room, around two in the morning usually, and Bruce was _good _at it. He'd never really been _good _at something that wasn't science or math or internalizing his emotions, and honestly, it was just the easiest and most enjoyable way he had of dealing with things for the time being.

And he still used that, when work got stressful or Tony was annoying or when he was bored, honestly. Tony had insisted on giving Bruce his own lab when he decided to move in, and though Bruce objected at first, ever-so-modestly not wanting to put any pressure on Tony, he was quick to realize that his own space towards the bottom of the tower could be useful. Not just for work things. Work things he could do anywhere.

But rap things, well… he needed his own space for that.

And he had it.

So occasionally during the day, after he was sure Tony or anybody else was gone, he'd walk over the sound system installed towards the back of the lab and slowly twist the volume knob, popping in one of the CDs from his rather expansive collection. Eminem, Tupac, Biggie Smalls. Bruce didn't care to write his own stuff. Took too much time, and honestly, his musical talent didn't extend far beyond being able to mold the timing of his words to a square 4/4 time mold and occasionally beat-box here and there.

He'd undo the top few buttons on his shirt (it was silly, but he liked to 'look the part' so to speak) and kick off his shoes, tapping a foot to gauge the time before he let himself release into the beat of the music, the words he knew by heart spilling effortlessly from his tongue.

"_The way you shake it / I can't believe it  
I ain't never seen an ass like that / the way you move it"_

He went through the whole album, his eyes closed, mind lost somewhere along the way in the throbbing basslines and beat of the drums. Sometimes he'd be so far gone that'd he'd lose track of the time and only snap out of it when he thought he heard footsteps approaching, and he'd scramble to hit the 'off' switch on the speakers and crash back into his work bench before the door opened.

This time, he didn't. Maybe the music was too loud or his mind was too wrapped up in the lyrics and images of somebody's apparently exquisite ass, but the door flew open without his consent, and it took him less than a split second to realize who was standing behind it.

"Shit, Banner, some mouth you got there."

Bruce could have sworn his heart skipped a beat. Dammit. Of all people to find out, too… the others probably would have had a similar reaction, but at least Steve or somebody would have had enough tact to take a quick glance and walk away, rather than Tony, who had the nerve to waltz right in and inquire about 'that ass' Bruce had been going on about.

"Really, Big Guy, that wasn't half bad," Tony quipped, hoisting himself onto one of the tables in the center of the room. "I mean, the whole half-buttoned shirt thing is a little extreme, but you've got some damn good rhythm."

"I swear to God, Tony." Bruce stifled a sigh and hastily killed the music, making quick, frustrated work of fixing his shirt and hurrying across the room to whatever schematics he'd been working on before. "Don't even start."

Tony slid away from the counter and sauntered towards where Bruce sat, putting a hand on the back of his chair to roll it away from the table. "What is this secret hobby you have, anyway? Have you always been able to rap like that? You have some sort of secret identity I don't know about?"

"No," Bruce muttered, pulling his chair away. "It's something I've done since I was a teenager. I just like it, I don't know. Don't tell anybody."

"Why not?" Bruce didn't turn to see it, but Tony's signature shit-eating grin was drawn sloppily across his face. "Come on. We could go somewhere with this. Could you even imagine? It'd be great. You could be like, Biggie Green or something. Actually, nah, that's dumb. We could –"

"_Tony._" Bruce threw a heated glance over his shoulder, catching Tony fiddling with one of his pens. "Seriously. Drop it. Or I'll tell everyone about the underwear thing."

"Please, I bet they all expect me to own a pair with an arc reactor drawn across my ass. Is that the one you were rapping about, by the way?"

"No." Bruce sighed exasperatedly, pinching his nose. "No. Just… let it go."

"Alright, alright. I'll drop it for now, 'Lil Gamma Hammer."


End file.
